> any fundamental differences between sandboxing of every thread in chrome and what electrolysis is doing?
"Sandboxing every thread" isn't exactly what Chrome does. Chrome provides a separate process for each browser tab. That, of course, requires more memory (since processes cannot directly share memory).
Firefox, on the other hand, uses a single process for the rendering for all tabs, but this process is separate from the main Firefox process. This means that the browser UI is still responsive even if one of the tabs is not responsive.
Of course, actual profiling may yield different results due to other factors that also affect memory usage, but ceteris paribus, using only two processes for n tabs should consume less memory than using n processes for n tabs.
This is definitely not always the case in my experience, although that might be due to some addon (I have quite a few) hanging the main FF thread/process.
I'd love to see a 'task manager' that can show CPU usage as well as memory use by individual tabs, because occasionally I see CPU use spike (noticed by laptop fans spinning up) and am reduced to closing random tabs in the hope it'll get better.
> This is definitely not always the case in my experience, although that might be due to some addon (I have quite a few) hanging the main FF thread/process.
My experience matches yours.
I think chimeracoder means that's the way Firefox works if e10s is enabled, which wouldn't be true for you unless you've explicitly done so. (I haven't enabled it either)
"Sandboxing every thread" isn't exactly what Chrome does. Chrome provides a separate process for each browser tab. That, of course, requires more memory (since processes cannot directly share memory).
Firefox, on the other hand, uses a single process for the rendering for all tabs, but this process is separate from the main Firefox process. This means that the browser UI is still responsive even if one of the tabs is not responsive.
Of course, actual profiling may yield different results due to other factors that also affect memory usage, but ceteris paribus, using only two processes for n tabs should consume less memory than using n processes for n tabs.